Expand the capabilities of your system with plugins

The main feature of the Open Ephys software is its modularity: New functions can be added via plugins, separate pieces of software that can be developed independently of the main software. We ship our software with a set of default plugins, but other developers have already started developing 'third party' plugins that you caninstall equally easily into your open ephys GUI.

This website serves as a list of plugins - see their respective pages on the wiki, on github, or elsewhere for more details.

Advantages of the plugin system:

Plugins are easy to develop because no knowledge of the remaining software is required.

Plugin are easy to use flexibly because they integrate with existing modules for data sources, file formats, etc.

Standardized interfaces and a well maintained build system mean you can share your methods and know they will work seamlessly in other labs.

There are two types of plugins:

Default plugins are included (and compiled) together with the Open Ephys GUI - no extra work needed to install them.

3rd party plugins are not bundled with the GUI but need to be downloaded separately, and installed by copying their files into the plugin directory and restarting the GUI. See here for a tutorial.

Default plugins (included)

These plugins currently come with the stable/master versions of the open ephys GUI.

Intan Rhythm Interface

This source can receive data from any FPGA running Intan's "Rhythm" firmware. It is compatible with both the Open Ephys acquisition board and the Intan RHD2000 Evaluation board.

Arduino Output

3rd party plugins (separate downloads)

These plugins are not shipped by default with the Open Ephys GUI but can be downloaded separately from our plugin repository, or form the repositories of the authors. See here for a tutorial on how to install them.

Frame Grabber

Arne F. Meyer, GatsbyA simple video4linux2-based video frame grabber plugin. It retrieves frames from any device supported by v4l2 and displays them using opencv. Moreover, frames can be saved to disk (in jpg format) together with open-ephys hardware time stamps making it easy to synchronize frames and recorded data later on. Depending on your camera this approach should be useful for most (behavioral) tracking experiments. In case the experiment requires very precise time stamps, e.g., high-speed whisker tracking, it might be a good idea to use a camera that can send TTL pulses for each frame.